


Time Zero

by AwCoffeeNo



Category: The Walking Dead & Related Fandoms, The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Happy Ending, Fix-It, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Isolation, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Alternating, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:41:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23437873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwCoffeeNo/pseuds/AwCoffeeNo
Summary: After Rick's death, Negan is struggling to find reasons to keep living. Halfway across the country, and unbeknownst to Negan, Rick fights to survive and return home.
Relationships: Rick Grimes/Negan
Comments: 8
Kudos: 64





	Time Zero

On the day that he was supposed to die, Rick survives. 

Rick gets lucky. 

Even though retrospectively, it feels like a miracle, it’s not mysterious at all what happens. It’s a trivial mistake and a mishap of timing: even though Rick has been riding successfully for years, he is too slow to calm his spooked horse. She rears back, and he can’t keep his hold on the reins. 

When he falls down to the ground, his world goes black with pain instantly, and when he wakes, mere moments later, he is stuck in place, impaled on a protruding section of exposed rebar. 

He recounts this chain of events dispassionately to himself through the wave of dizziness and disorientation that follows, through the sheer horror that hits him as he comes to, skewered right through his back and right out his stomach. 

Rick knows a few things about pain at this point. He’s sustained more than his fair share of injuries. He’s been shot multiple times (in the leg, in the flank, and right through the shoulder). He’s had the palms of his hands cut open and pierced straight through, his ribs bruised or broken more times than he cares to count. Indeed, he has accumulated such an array of mid-grade scars across the entirety of his body that he no longer remembers where most of them came from. Those which he _does_ still recall come from a long, long time ago: the white ridge across his left knuckle from a knife slip in the kitchen a year into his and Lori’s marriage; the pale cross-hatching on his knee from stitches after he flew over the handlebars of his bike at age 10. Now, his threshold for pain has gotten so high that most things barely register. Last spring, he’d broken his ankle, and hardly realized it: he’d walked around on it for days, hardly even limping.

This injury though? The pain is astonishing. It is catastrophic to his body. He knows that instantly upon waking. It's a pain he didn’t feel as it was happening, but which he imagines he’ll dream about in flashes for years to come. 

It feels different than the multitude of wounds that have come before it. It feels violating and wrong. It takes him time to realize what happened, to actualize it. It takes him time he doesn’t have to realize that the rebar went in him, and through him and that he’s pinned in place by it. 

It feels… fatal. 

In police training, he learned to never take the penetrating object out of a wound. Almost certainly, if he pulls himself from the concrete slab and to his feet, he’ll bleed out and die. 

But he doesn’t care, he realizes. He needs the rebar out of his body. He needs it _out_ , right now. He needs that more than he needs to get away from the hoard bearing down on him. He needs that _more_ than he needs to survive. It’s already too late for him and probably has been since he got on the back of Daryl’s motorcycle. Since he got out of bed this morning, even. 

Since he started planning the bridge. 

Since he slit Negan’s throat. 

Everything he has built, everything he ever cared about? It’s gone, now, or soon will be. And here he is, with a rod of metal stuck inside of him, moments from being devoured alive. 

Horror. That’s what drives him, as he wrenches his body free. Not the fear of the approaching herd of zombies. Not thoughts of his family, or the bridge, or anything in this world which he cares about. He doesn’t think about the color of Judith’s hair, and not knowing if it will fade with age to the same shade of brown as his own. He doesn’t think about the last thing he said to Michonne. He just thinks _it’s inside of me_ , with horror which overcomes any pain. 

He undoes his belt and wrenches upward.

That, ultimately, is how he survives. 

It’s a miracle, but it feels so… mundane. Just another in a long string of pains which he has been forced to endure. 

\-- 

In the dream, Rick closes his eyes, and when he opens them, he’s standing at the edge of a lake. 

He knows this place: it’s the cabin he and Aaron visited on a supply run, long ago. But now, it is transformed into something entirely different. The water is clear and pristine, and almost unnaturally blue. There’s no hint of the dead -- Rick thinks, perhaps, in this world, the dead never rose to begin with. It looks like a lake home where he might have gone as a child. That is if either he or Shane’s parents had ever had the money for vacations or second homes. 

Finding himself to be in very little control of his own body, he is walking without his own volition to the edge of the body of water. 

He is taking off his clothes and folding them: shirt, pants, socks. Leaving his shoes lined up beside them. Bandages. Under his feet, the stones at the edge of the pond cut into his feet, and blood flows sluggishly from his side. 

Standing there, at the edge of the water, it all seems to make perfect sense: he is dying. It’s his time. He is dying, yet he is still folding his clothes on the bank of the river, as though he may yet come back for them. 

He walks out into the water until he can’t walk anymore, and then he just floats there in the depthless clear water. A moment passes, and then he slowly exhales and sinks below the surface.

Rick always thought that drowning sounded like a painful death. It’s not here. It’s calm. _Rest in peace_ , he tells himself, and opens his mouth. 

He breathes in water and wakes himself by coughing. 

\--

Half-awake, and swaying on the back of his horse, he tells himself: _you’re not drowning, but I think you might have punctured a lung, Grimes._

If it’s that, he thinks he has thirty minutes, maybe. If it’s just the pain making it hard for him to breathe -- well, he doesn’t know. 

He’s bleeding a lot. 

Had to be a white horse he rode today. 

\-- 

Six years. That’s how long it’s been since Rick left. 

Things were touch-and-go there, for a while. Negan’s a man enough to admit that. 

That’s what he tells Gabriel. That phrase serves him well when the one-eyed priest comes down to sit by his prison cell and play therapist (therapist, and a tad too much _evangelist_ for Negan’s liking). The phrase remains a sweeping misnomer which glosses over in an instant many years of both his most mountainous peaks and his deepest valleys.

It’s pleasant for them both, he thinks, to pretend that they can forget the violent swings of emotion which overcame Negan when he was first locked away here. It hadn’t been his best look: his psyche had pitched him from the heights of fury to the extremes of despair with absolutely blinding speed, and there had been little Negan could do about it except to sit tight for the ride. 

So. _Touch-and-go._ He says it for himself, mostly. Gabe knows. Knows all of it, and no deflection of Negan’s can change that. Gabe has seen Negan with his head all bashed-up from a botched suicide attempt. He’s seen Negan weep. Seen Negan sick with the flu. He -- and so many others in Alexandria -- have been permitted to see Negan in ways he never wanted _anyone_ to see him. 

Gabe’s been coming down here for years. It doesn’t feel like it’s just been years. Feels like he’s been down here for a lifetime, and more than that. 

_Worse_ than that. He feels as though he has already lived all the lives he will live and died all the deaths there are to die. He feels as though he died once, the first time, on the floor of the D.C-area hospital where Lucille turned walker. That day, he went into hospital as one thing and came back out as something irrevocably different. Maybe, he thinks now, something much worse. He knows that, certainly, he died once more by Rick’s brutal hands, gushing blood and staring up into the blue of the other man’s eyes as they burned with fatal rage. 

He’s lucky, he supposes: he came back again as something different. Not something _better_ , per se, but different nonetheless. 

That wasn’t even the last time! A little bit less than a week after Maggie came down to visit him, while he was sleeping off his concussion in two-hour increments, Siddiq turned up to deliver him some fatal news. 

Alexandria’s good doctor had come down to change the bandages on his head and have Negan follow his finger with his eyes to check how his self-inflicted concussion was healing. He’d examined Negan wordlessly that day. Siddiq was always sparse with his words, but he didn’t hate Negan with the raw fury that Rick’s original group did. His silence aroused Negan’s fears. 

_Where’s Rick_ , Negan had asked, over and over, still bleary with the after-effects of the concussion. _Where’s Rick, where’s Rick, when’s my Rick coming back? How long has it been?_

Siddiq hadn’t even had to tell him. He didn’t need to speak a single word. Negan had known. Negan had seen the tears in the younger man’s eyes as he’d departed, not a single word spoken. He’d known that Rick was gone. And, in that same instant, he’d known that he was never, ever getting out of this cell if he wasn’t cold and dead. 

He really thought he was gonna do it that night. Closest he ever got. 

It would have been nothing, to tie a noose from the window -- really, if anyone had wanted to prevent that, they would have taken his bedsheets, his clothes. But they didn't, and he figured no one really _did_ care if he turned up dead. No one except Rick, maybe, and that ship had sailed. 

He could have done it. In the dead of night, he sat on his bed, and looked out at the diffuse light which his little window let in, and wondered how long Rick Grimes had been dead, and why they never goddamn thought to tell him. 

He almost did it. But he thought about turning. About _coming back_ , in a different way, again. He wondered before he could help himself if Rick had turned walker himself in the end. And he wondered what it would be like if he did. He thought about waking up with gnashing teeth and nothing left to him but an all-consuming hunger. He’d turn if he hung himself. No way around it. He’d managed to convince himself he wouldn’t if he’d managed to bash his own head in. But he hadn’t been able to do that, in the end, not even driven by rage and sheer impulse. 

These days, he knows he’s never gonna do anything. 

These days, six years later, he counts the passage of time obsessively. He doesn’t have a watch, or even a calendar, or marks on the wall, but that doesn’t stop him from counting the days. The hours. 

Three times a day, someone brings him food. 

Once every three days, he’s let out to bathe. 

Once a week, Gabriel comes down to talk to him. 

Once a month, Rosita cuffs him to a chair and buzzes his hair, not a single word spoken between then. That same day, every other month, Siddiq strips him down ass-naked and checks him over with strictly clinical interest. This, too, is predictable: Siddiq berates him every month for the patches of his skin he picks at, which after years of abuse are nothing but scar tissue, and for the next few weeks, things like peanut butter, blocks of chocolate, and extra portions of meat will appear on his plate. Like Negan is a dog Siddiq is trying to fatten up. At this point, he doesn’t know why the doctor bothers.

Depressingly, this monthly check-up is the most anyone ever touches him. Drove him crazy, the first few years he was down here. 

It all forms a certain rhythm in his life, the same relentless pounding as the sound of his tennis ball, hitting the wall and bouncing back, for hours at a time. It’s not enjoyable, not anymore: just another nervous tick, developed over the years of captivity. 

Better, he supposed, than pacing until his feet get blisters, as he once did. 

He’s… waiting for something, and he’s not sure what. 

In the dream, the dream he has night after night, Rick comes back down the stairs to his cell in the depths of night, dripping wet, and coughs water onto the floor of his cell. Negan says Rick’s name over and over, but Rick never looks at him. 

Six years and he swears he still remembers perfectly the blue of Rick’s eyes, and the sound of his voice and the way gray was coming into his hair. All perfectly. 

Six years, and he’s never quite believed Rick is dead. 

\-- 

When Rick comes to, in the helicopter that day, he is absolutely sure he is dead. It’s a feeling which will stick with him, in the coming years. 

As Anne tells him, frantically and repeatedly, that he’s _going to be alright_ , Rick lifts his arm above his head to look at his watch. It is one of the hardest things he’s ever done, an absolutely absurd effort that sends what is easily the worst pain of his life shooting through his body. It’s astonishing he stays conscious long enough to see that the watch face is broken. 

It feels bogglingly significant. Since the first days of this apocalypse, he’s kept his watch in perfect working condition. Now, looking at it, he feels like he’s situated at the event horizon of some unspeakable new catastrophe, and that after this moment, nothing will ever be the same. 

The watch’s face is shattered. There’s nothing there to see. The timepiece, which followed him from the old world into this new one, is broken. Time stands still, the counter set back to zero. 

“Please,” he gasps. “ _Please._ Radio down. My wife… My daughter…” 

Every word is agony, even at a whisper. Anne hears him, still. He sees as her eyes move toward him, even though she herself is unmoving. Minutely, she shakes her head. 

He never forgives her for this. 

\-- 

After the snowstorm, Negan never goes back to his cell. 

He’s not permitted to live freely within the walls of Alexandria, either, but after the years he spent imprisoned there, he finds he doesn’t want to. Out past the front gates, there are a few half-ruined houses, and under Michonne’s careful watch, he’s permitted to leave from the infirmary and to start to rebuild the most promising of the uninhabited houses. He is even given basic weapons and a vehicle (unfortunately for him, it’s an uninspiring station wagon, but beggars can’t be choosers). 

“He would have wanted it,” Michonne tells him when she drops off the weapons. “He always wanted better for you, you know.” 

She doesn’t have to utter Rick’s name. Negan knows. No one likes to say Rick’s name, these days. For Negan’s part, it’s just because it would get caught in his throat. Maybe it’s the same for Michonne. 

Negan doesn’t know that Rick would want him free. Last Rick told him, he was gonna rot in his cell forever. But he isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

Few people visit him, outside Alexandria’s gates. Siddiq is one, although Negan thinks that’s probably just on account of his Hippocratic oath. Siddiq says the work on the house is good for his leg, which remains stiff and sore from the injury he sustained in the snowstorm, weeks running into months later. The young doctor tells him it’s nerve damage. Just his bad luck. Bad luck it sure is! The pain varies, day to day, as unpredictable as the weather. Some days he’s fine; others he walks about gracelessly with a cane by day and lies awake white-knuckling his way through phantom pains at night. Such a trivial injury it had seemed, out of all those he’s had, and yet it continues to trouble him. 

Judy visits too. She helps him hammer away at his folly of a home, all while viciously making fun of him. It can’t be said that she takes after Rick much in terms of looks, but she’s got his spirit. It makes his heart just ache. Rick hardly knew her. 

Negan would bear a thousand such injuries to keep her safe. 

\-- 

There aren’t many people capable of doing what Rick does. 

Leading a group of people, _now?_ At the end of the god-damn world? He used to believe that the only reason he did it was that no one else would. 

Not anymore. The thought has been beaten, bled, and bruised right out of him. Now he knows he’s exceptional. 

His skillset, it turns out, is so precious that the people who took him away from everything he loves (people who still have the _audacity_ to call themselves the U.S Government) keep him under lock and key every instant he’s not leading missions for them, each seeming more dangerous than the last. They keep him under lock and key and armed guard, like some rabid dog they’ve trained to do their bidding. 

More and more, Rick begins to feel like an animal, too. His kennel might be a repurposed hotel room with electricity, running water, white carpet, and refrigeration (luxuries that seem more like a cruel kind of taunting than mercy), but it’s a prison all the same, complete with an armed guard and an ankle bracelet. 

He tries to escape, at first, then less and less, as the years go by and his failures rack up. He tries to be careful working missions, at first, tries to _survive_ missions, and then, later, he doesn’t. He stops thinking of Judith, growing older by the year, and the harsh lines appearing on his face which demarks the relentless passage of time.

But for all his recklessness, he seems to only become more effective. Even now, he can’t stomach seeing the people he’s responsible for die, even if that responsibility doesn’t come willingly. The people he leads on missions to the inner cities still packed with the dead, and through the long-darkened hallways of hospitals and universities too dangerous for any other group to loot are mostly no more willing than he is. Just more government conscripts. 

He marks the days on the far wall of the hotel room, a lonesome and maddening tally. 

1825 days after his arrival -- five years, even, if he trusts his own tally -- he realizes he might not be able to pick the now eight-year-old Judith Grimes out of a crowd. 

The next day, he successfully steals a helicopter and makes it as far as Ohio before crashing into a cornfield. 

\-- 

It’s slow going, at first, rebuilding the house. Negan’s short both material and skill, and gone are the days where he could Google his way through the project. Still, he manages, scavenging a patchwork of materials from the surrounding area, and forcing it to work with more determination than skill. 

The first night he spends out there, after he’s patched up the one busted-down wall and boarded up the windows well enough to feel safe from walkers, the roof is still tarped over, and poorly at that, still letting in a sliver of sky. 

He sleeps like a rock that night, wakes up to a patch of sunlight on his face, and cries with joy. 

In the morning, he shaves away the beard he’s been growing and looks directly at the scar Rick gave him for the first time in years. Time has hardly faded it: it still stands out from his skin white and raised, prominently visible. 

He thinks he looks ten years younger. 

\--

As the days go by, that joy fades. His recurring nightmares about Rick’s death have slowed in frequency, over the years, but after he leaves his prison cell they stop completely. Despite the regular exercise required for doing his own supply runs (and for the first time in many years at that!), his leg only seems to be getting worse. He can get around all right, at the moment, but the fear of deterioration remains an ever-present fixture in his mind. There's only so long a man with a bum leg is going to last in this world. 

He begins to wonder… after so much time has passed, is it even possible that Rick is still alive? Even if he were, by some miracle, to have survived the original explosion, enough years have gone by for Negan to have half a dozen close scrapes with death. He can hardly imagine that Rick, if he’s out there, is any safer. 

The future stretches before him, and once again, it begins to feel too long. Too _predictable_ , and yet still dotted with things he fears. He doesn’t want to live to see Alexandria fall, although in his experience it’s only a matter of time. He doesn’t want to live into old age much further than he already has, not to the point of uselessness. He’s over fifty now. It’s only a matter of time until his age catches up to him. 

More than anything, he doesn’t want to forget Rick. Man has been dead, what, seven years now? Still, Negan thinks of him constantly. More and more, he begins to doubt himself -- does he really still remember the sound of Rick’s voice? Can he really still recall the furrow of his brow? 

That first spring, he breaks ground for a garden out in a clearing near his house. He thinks of how Michonne said Rick wanted more for him. He’s now lived out the better part of a decade in Rick’s absence. He can live until autumn to see some vegetables through ‘till harvest. 

Might as well do _something_ good in this world. 

And, well, maybe he’s too pessimistic. Not too many walkers around this part of the world these days. It’s been too heavily inhabited for too long. Maybe he’ll be safer than he thinks. Even now, the walkers that he does see -- and which he still dispatches with ease -- seem more and more decrepit by the day. 

They never did find Rick’s body. 

\-- 

When Rick comes back, Negan’s the first one to see him. 

He thinks, at first, he’s seeing things. It’s all so fantastically unlikely: Rick Grimes, coming up the road, his image flickering and guttering in the distance from the heat shimmer of late summer. He thinks, at first, that his age must be catching up with him, and that his distance vision is going. Or maybe he’s finally snapped. 

But moments later, he hears a cry from the watchtower, and he hears the gates of Alexandria crash open with alarming speed. 

Rick doesn’t arrive with any particular fanfare. There’s no descending helicopter, no army of survivors he leads with him, no bolt from the heavens. Rick arrives at Alexandria much how he came: with determination, and on foot, crusted in sweat and dirt. 

Negan’s instinct is to run to him, but running isn’t an option today. Leg’s bad. By the time he’s gotten to his feet from where he was sitting out in his garden, Michonne is already running past his little shack to meet Rick. She doesn’t even see Negan, she just takes off in the direction of Rick, Judith trailing after her. 

Judith skids to a stop by Negan’s doorstep: “That -- that’s him?” she gasps, her brown eyes wide and questioning and looking right into Negan’s. 

“Yeah kid,” Negan says, sounding almost as out of breath as Judith. “That’s your dad.” 

As soon as Negan says it, she’s off again as though she was only waiting for Negan’s permission to go. Negan just stands there dumb and watches her go, blinking into the light like he’s fucking stupid or something. 

Judith’s sheriff's hat flies from her head, and lands on the dirt road behind her, forgotten. 

Negan is looking long enough to see when Michonne slams into Rick, and how Rick holds her in his arms. Across the half-wild grass of his front yard and the green field beyond, some heartwarming shit is playing out, but he averts his eyes in shame, his stomach dropping right out from under him like he’s just taken a roller coaster drop. 

He’s loved Judy like his own, ever since Rick went, but she is not his child. He has longed for Rick like they were lovers, but they never were. They never were anything like that at all. Just captor and prisoner. Just old enemies. Everything Negan has done in Rick’s absence, everything that might make him a _better person?_ Surely means nothing to Rick. 

Rick hasn’t been there to see it. Rick’s been dead. 

All these years he’s spent pining and grieving in equal measure, and he’s never thought beyond this moment. Never thought what he would do when Rick came _back._

Negan can’t face them. Maybe he hasn’t always been a coward, but he’s a coward now: he leaves before Rick and his family has the chance to walk back past him. 

\-- 

At first, in Rick’s home in Alexandria, everything seems perfect. 

His worst fears, which have fed his nightmares for years, have not come to pass. Alexandria stands. His _home_ , even, remains standing and familiar, even if it is now beginning to show its age in chipped paint and scratched floors. Michonne is alive. _Judith_ is alive. The garden beds of Alexandria grow fertile crops, and children play in the streets. It’s an oasis of calm, unlike anything he’s seen for years. It is, perhaps, unlike anything left in this world. 

Judith has grown up to look more like Lori that Rick had any right to hope. He can see Shane in her, too, but even that doesn’t ache like he thought it might. She’s grown up sharp and funny and tough and has the shining vivacity of someone who has never known anything but this world. She belongs here with ease that amazes Rick. 

Despite the thousands of times he has imagined this reunion, and despite how desperately and dearly he has held it in his heart, he realizes that he lacked the imagination to even dream up what are now the best parts. These are: remembering the sweet smell of Michonne’s skin, long forgotten. His daughter running her hands through his overgrown curls and laughing. The ache in his face from smiling. 

It doesn’t last. 

\--

Judith shows up pounding at Negan’s door in the dead of night. 

When he stumbles up from his bed and to the door, his heart pounding, gun in one hand and lantern in the other, he’s sure there’s some terrible news -- isn’t there always? He’s sure someone has died, or some portion of Alexandria’s wall has been breached by the dead, or some other yet-unknown terror has come to kill them all. 

Instead, it’s just Rick’s daughter, peering up at him out of the darkness with shining eyes. “You look like shit,” she tells him when he opens the door. Cussing still sounds funny in her little-kid voice. 

“Language, missy.” His voice is still scratchy with sleep and booze, and there’s little reprimand in it. She’s right: he hasn’t exactly been coping well. In the few days since Rick’s return, Negan’s been staying home, hitting his emergency alcohol stash heavily, and not a whole lot else. 

Usually, Judith has no issue with marching right into his home uninhibited. Now, she hesitates on the stoop. 

“What’s going on? Has something happened?” Negan asks tensely. 

Judith shakes her head. Then, without a moment’s warning, and to Negan’s absolute astonishment, she throws herself into his arms. 

He’s lucky she’s small, or she might have knocked him from his still-drunk feet. “Jesus, Jude --” 

“I don’t know him!” she sobs out. “I don’t know him at all! And he -- he thinks he knows me, and he thinks he’s my dad. And they all expect me to just go on like normal when I didn’t --” she breaks off, hiccupping. “When I don’t even recognize him!” 

Her words hit Negan like a gut punch. Awkwardly, he moves to stroke her hair. He hardly knows what to say, or how to possibly comfort her. “He’s… he’s a good man. One of the best.” 

Judith’s little hands are digging into his sides hard enough to hurt. For a moment, Negan’s own eyes burn with tears. 

Taking a breath to steady himself, he gently pries her off him. “Let’s sit down, huh?” 

She sniffs. “You smell like alcohol.” 

“Yeah, well…. I haven’t been coping so great either.”

She comes and sits at his kitchen table, drying her eyes on her sleeve and sniffing. He lights a few candles, boosting the light in the room enough that they can both see the clutter around them. Negan’s home is usually messy, but it’s unusually bad today: dishes in the sink, the table almost completely covered in junk, dirty clothes strewn on the floor. 

Judith looks critically at the mostly-empty fifth of vodka sitting out on the table, brow wrinkled. Guiltily, Negan grabs it away and tosses it in a cabinet. “Don’t look at that, kid,” he admonishes. 

“Tell me about my dad,” she asks Negan finally, her voice incredibly small. 

So Negan does. 

\-- 

A few days later, at the end of the day, Rick Grimes himself comes to grace Negan’s doorstep. 

Time has treated Rick well: he looks bulkier than he ever did in Alexandria, his arms tanned golden brown and roped with well-defined muscles that speak to many hours of hard and unrelenting work. His hair, now entirely silver, shines with health in the early evening sunlight. 

Negan is sure the same cannot be said for him. He answers the door with a cane in one hand, and the scar on his neck feeling glaringly obvious under the gaze of the man who put it there. 

Still, when Negan opens the door of his home to Rick, Rick _smiles_. He smiles like he’s as happy to see Negan as anyone he’s ever met. “Negan. Been a long time.” 

It feels like his heart just stopped beating, and is just shuddering in his chest. “Long time yourself, Rick Grimes.” 

Always right to the point, Rick was, and apparently now is no exception. He gestures down at the cane in Negan’s hand and his stiff leg. “Michonne tells me you got that for the sake of my little girl. I…. I can’t ever thank you enough.” 

It’s incredible Negan is able to speak. He feels like gasping for air like he’s just sprinted a mile. “Don’t thank me. It was the least I could do.” 

Rick smiles ruefully. “Seems a lot has changed since last I was here. Judy just sent me here to ask you to come for dinner. Maybe you can help me catch up.” 

Negan never forgot the color of Rick’s eyes. He never forgot the sound of his voice. Just looking at Rick now feels like an incredible luxury. He nods assent and doesn’t speak. Doesn’t trust himself to. 

If Rick sees the dampness in Negan’s eyes, he doesn’t say anything to it. He clasps Negan’s shoulder in one strong hand, all warmth. “I’m proud of what everyone has done. I’m proud of what you’ve done.” 

Again, Rick smiles. Brilliant like the sun. A miracle in the first degree. “Judith tells me you turned out okay. More than okay.” 

\-- 

In front of Rick’s house, they pause. 

Rick just stands there, at the doorway to his own home, his steps faltering. Brow knit, he turns to Negan. 

“You’ve been here. I haven’t. Do you think… you don’t think it’s too late? To put it all back together? I’ve been gone so long. I’m not stupid. I see what happened. I know Judith doesn’t know me from anything but stories. I know Michonne’s been through so much now without me. It feels like maybe… everything’s moved on. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to come back. Feels like I’ve been dead. Maybe it’s wrong.” 

“I never gave up hope,” Negan admits. “I don’t think they did, either.” 

Rick smiles wryly, but his voice betrays some genuine anxiety. “I survived the apocalypse, I came back from the dead, and I’m scared of family dinner?” 

Negan can’t help but reply with all earnestness: “You survived all that. You can do it again. ” 

The warm light from the house shines on Rick’s face. “Hmm. You’re right. We’ve done it before. Maybe… maybe we’ll get one more shot.”

And with that, they go inside.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm stuck at home under lockdown orders, so I figured it's time to start cleaning up and publishing my drafts, starting with this very-belated fix-it. Hope everyone is safe and well. <3
> 
> Dialogue in the last scene very loosely inspired by this (timely) [comic.](https://deeerdraws.tumblr.com/post/121089217131/i-think-crows-will-be-the-next-dominant-species-on)


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